H

Cursive script 'h' and capital 'H

'
H
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
H (named aitch /ˈeɪtʃ/, plural aitches;
[1]
is the eighth letter in the ISO
basic Latin alphabet.
Contents
1 History
2 Name in English
3 Use in English
4 Use in other languages
5 Use in science
6 Related letters and other similar characters
7 Computing codes
8 Other representations
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
History
Egyptian hieroglyph
fence
Old Semitic
ħ
Phoenician
heth
Greek
heta
Etruscan
H
Latin
H
The Semitic letter 'ח' ('ê') most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter
probably stood for a fence or posts.
The Greek eta 'Η' in the Archaic period still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/). In
this context the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets the letter
heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/.
Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later
re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/
from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most
Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/. 'H' is also used in
many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch' which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish, Galician, Old
Portuguese and English, /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German,
Czech, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and /ç/ in German.
Name in English
In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/ and spelled 'aitch'
[1]
or occasionally
'eitch'. The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling 'haitch' is often considered to be h-adding and
hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English
[2]
and other varieties of English, such as those
of Malaysia, Newfoundland, and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach
aitch and Catholics haitch.
[3]
In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching and is
estimated to be in use by 60% of the population.
[4]
The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for
example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy
with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.
[5]
The non-standard haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of
English people born since 1982
[6]
and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common
among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still
considered to be standard, although the non-standard pronunciation is also attested as a legitimate variant.
[7]
Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original
name of the letter was [ˈaha] in Latin; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French
[ˈatʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [ˈaːtʃ]. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two
obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting
the former's ..., H, K, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a
pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.
[8]
Use in English
In English, 'h' occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/) and in various digraphs,
such as 'ch' /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), 'gh' (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), 'ph' (/f/), 'rh' (/r/), 'sh' (/ʃ/), 'th' (/θ/ or /ð/), 'wh'
(/hw/
[9]
). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well as in certain
other words (mostly of French origin) such as hour, honest, herb (in American but not British English) and
vehicle. Initial /h/ is often not pronounced in the weak form of some function words including had, has, have,
he, her, him, his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales) it is
often omitted in all words (see h-dropping). It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the
indefinite article before a word beginning with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in "an hotel", but use of a is now
more usual (see English articles: Indefinite article).
Use in other languages
In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates
that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'), only the first 'h' represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling
reform eliminated the silent 'h' in nearly all instances of 'th' in native German words such as thun ('to do') or
Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater ('theater') and Thron
('throne'), which continue to be spelled with 'th' even after the last German spelling reform.
In Spanish and Portuguese, 'h' ("hache" in Spanish, agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent
letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son') and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an
earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/. It is sometimes pronounced, with the value [h], in some regions of
Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias and the Americas in the beginning of some words as harina, hartar, herida or
hacer. 'H' also appears in the digraph 'ch', which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and hinterland northern Portugal, and
/ʃ/ in oral traditions that merged both sounds (the latter originarily represented by 'x' instead) e.g. in most of the
Portuguese language and some Spanish-speaking places, prominently Chile, as well as 'nh' /ɲ/ and 'lh' /ʎ/ in
Portuguese, whose spelling is inherited from Occitan.
In French, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with
this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The
h muet, or "mute h", is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite
article le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an h muet followed by a vowel. For example,
le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of 'h' is called h aspiré
("aspirated h", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For
example in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a
bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an h muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek
through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe,
hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic 'h' was added
to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the
letters 'v' and 'u': huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through
Latin ostrea).
In Italian, 'h' has no phonological value. Its most important uses are to differentiate the spellings of certain short
words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno,
'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), in short interjections (oh, ehi), and in the digraphs 'ch' /k/ and 'gh' /ɡ/.
Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Finnish, use 'h' as a breathy voiced glottal fricative
[ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.
In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, 'h' is also commonly used for /ɦ/, normally
written with the Cyrillic letter 'г'.
In Irish, h is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words, however 'h' placed
after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates lenition of that consonant; 'h' began to replace the
original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.
In most dialects of Polish, both 'h' and the digraph 'ch' always represent /x/.
The Russian language has no /h/ sound and there is no letter to represent this sound in the Russian (Cyrillic)
alphabet.
[10]
In transliterations the letter 'x' (pronounced as /x/) is used, as in Хэмпшир for "Hampshire",
although in some longer established names 'г' (pronounced /ɡ/) is for 'h', as in Генрих for "Henry".
Use in science
H is the symbol for the henry, the SI derived unit of inductance.
The chemical symbol of Hydrogen is H.
The Heaviside step function is usually denoted by H.
The symbol of the Higgs boson is H
0
.
The Planck constant is denoted by h.
The h-index is used to measure the impact of scientists.
[11]
As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two
sounds. The lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form, [ʜ],
represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. A superscript [ʰ] is used to represent aspiration.
Related letters and other similar characters
Н н : Cyrillic letter En. The similarity is purely graphic, since Cyrillic En is derived from Greek Ν ν
Η η : Greek letter Eta. It is the source of another Cyrillic letter, И
Һ һ : Cyrillic letter Shha
Ĥ ĥ : Latin letter H with circumflex
Ħ ħ : Latin letter H with stroke
h : Planck constant
ℏ : reduced Planck constant
ʰ : marker for aspirated consonants
ẖ : ẖ, h with macron below
ḥ : Ḥ, h with dot below
Computing codes
Character
H h
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H LATIN SMALL LETTER H
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 72 U+0048 104 U+0068
UTF-8 72 48 104 68
Numeric character reference &#72; &#x48; &#104; &#x68;
EBCDIC family 200 C8 136 88
ASCII
1
72 48 104 68
1
and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of
encodings.
Other representations
NATO phonetic Morse code
Hotel · · · ·
Signal flag
Flag semaphore
Braille
dots-125
See also
American Sign Language grammar
List of hieroglyphs/H
References
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